William J. Bryan’s Fight against Eugenics and Racism in the Scopes Trial

Abstract

It is commonly believed that the Scopes trial was about the propriety of banning the teaching of evolution pushed by ignorant persons for religious reasons. In fact, not just human evolution but racism were the major concerns. This fact is well documented, and a review of the books used to teach evolution in the public schools at the time shows that they were blatantly racist. This fact is critical in understanding the concerns of those supporting the Butler act law, which was the focus of the trial.

Introduction

Almost 90 years ago “the trial of the century,” the now-infamous Scopes evolution
trial, occurred in Dayton, Tennessee (Lienesch 2007). The textbook involved,
titled A Civic Biology (1914), was mandated by the state of Tennessee and many
other states. For nearly a decade Hunter’s book was the most widely used high
school science textbook in the nation. It was endorsed by many distinguished
professors, including those at both Brown and Columbia Universities (Larson
1997). In 1919 the Tennessee Textbook Commission selected the Hunter book as
the biology text for use in every one of its public schools.

The state of Tennessee did not have any issues with the bulk of the text, most
of which covered basic information about earth’s plants and animals. Then, in
March of 1925, the Tennessee Legislature passed the following law:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, that it shall
be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other
public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public
school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the
Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man
has descended from a lower order of animals (Ginger 1974, p. 3).

The statute was aimed at teaching the evolutionary origins of human beings
(“the Divine Creation of man”), not the origin of the rest of life or even the
origin of life. The law was intended to allow parents the right to instruct
their children in matters of the origin of humans, human nature, and the destiny
of humans. Because the law did not openly conflict with any section in A
Civic Biology, which did not openly teach human evolution, the text remained
in use throughout the state. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz correctly
noted that those actively advocating evolution in 1925 included “racists, militarists,
and nationalists,” who used evolution “to push some pretty horrible programs,”
including forced sterilization (1990, p. 2). Those who wanted to prevent the
immigration into America of persons judged by eugenists then as “unfit” and
“inferior,” or of “inferior racial stock,” worked to pass the so-called “Jim
Crow” laws. They rationalized their agenda on the grounds that blacks, Jews
and others were racially inferior and would interbreed with the superior races,
causing deterioration of the superior white race (Dershowitz 1990, p. 2). Dershowitz
added that the eugenics movement “took its impetus from Darwin’s theory of natural
selection,” explaining that German militarism

drew inspiration from Darwin’s survival of the fittest [law]. The
anti-immigration movement, which had succeeded in closing American ports of
entry to “inferior racial stock,” was grounded in a mistaken belief that certain
ethnic groups had evolved more fully than others. The very book—Hunter’s Civic
Biology—from which John T. Scopes taught Darwin’s theory of evolution to
high school students in Dayton, Tennessee, contained dangerous misapplications
of that theory. It explicitly accepted the naturalistic fallacy and repeatedly
drew moral instruction from nature. Indeed, its very title, Civic Biology,
made it clear that biology had direct political implications for civic society
(Dershowitz 1990, p. 2).

Darwin explained in detail the process of how selection functioned and the
importance of death and war in advancing evolution. He stressed “how all-important,
in the never-ceasing wars of savages, fidelity and courage” were to evolution,
adding that a nation with superior qualities, those selected by natural selection,
would have an evolutionary advantage that would enable them to destroy the weaker
races (Darwin 1871, p. 162). This process of conflict was critical for evolution,
and when natural selection that resulted from conflict—such as from war—ceases,
evolution also ceases. Hitler and other dictators repeatedly stressed this point—Hitler
in his “bible” Mein Kampf, and Marx, Engles, Lennin, Mao, and Stalin in their
voluminous writings (Bergman 2012).

Bryan’s Fight against the Degradation of Humans and Racism

The law was supported by the famous Christian attorney, William J. Bryan, and
opposed by the well-known agnostic attorney, University of Michigan trained
Clarence Darrow. At issue in the 1925 trial were certain chapters on evolution
and eugenics in a biology text by George W. Hunter. A major concern of attorney
William J. Bryan was the degradation of humans by evolution and the influence
of evolution on war and national conflicts. He wrote that the Darwinian theory
teaches mankind reached “his present perfection by the operation of the law
of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak”
(quoted in Larson 2003, p. 252).

One book that influenced Bryan to draw this conclusion about the doctrine of
evolution was written by American biologist Vernon Kellogg, who documented the
importance of Darwinism in causing War World I (Kellogg 1917). The Hunter text
perfectly illustrated Bryan’s concern because it was “laced with the racism
of the day” (Larson 1997, p. 23). Its discussion of eugenics included such
scarlet passages as the following openly racist claim:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man,
each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an
extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in
Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American
Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan,
and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented
by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America (Hunter 1914, p. 196).

Hunter also wrote that, if we can improve domesticated animals by breeding
then “future generations of men and women on the earth” can also “be improved
by applying to them the laws of selection” taught by Darwin. Hunter stressed
that this is no small concern because nothing less than the “improvement of
the future race” is at stake (1914, p. 261). Hunter then, under the subheading
“Eugenics,” which made it clear what type of “improvement” programs he was referring
to, applied the animal breeding research to humans:

When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the
race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases
which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dreaded white
plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy,
and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal
to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics
(1914, p. 261).

When defending his eugenics program, Hunter incorrectly concluded that Tuberculosis
(TB) is a genetic disease—TB is actually caused by bacteria pathogens. Furthermore,
the main causes of both epilepsy and feeble-mindedness are pathogens, trauma,
and genetic damage occurring in the womb due to such conditions as genetic non-disjunction,
not heredity as Hunter claimed. Hunter then wrote that research had been completed
on many different families in America,

in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both of the original
parents. The “Jukes” family is a notorious example. . .. In seventy-five years the
progeny of the original generation has cost the state of New York over a million
and a quarter of dollars, besides giving over to the care of prisons and asylums
considerably over a hundred feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral or criminal persons
(1914, pp. 261–262).

One now infamous case that Hunter cited was the “Kallikak” family that

has been traced to the union of Martin Kallikak, a young soldier of
the War of the Revolution, with a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded
son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these
33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded.
The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-mindedness later
married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line of 496 descendants have
come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. The evidence and the moral
speak for themselves (1914, pp. 261–263, emphasis in original)!

Both of the Jukes and Kallikak family studies have now been thoroughly debunked
by a reevaluation of the data and cases used to support the studies’ original
conclusions (Smith 1985). The study is fatally flawed because it implied that
the source of both the so-called bad as well as the good genes was from the
female: the man bore all good progeny from the Quaker girl, and all bad progeny
from the putative feeble-minded girl.

These irresponsible studies were the “product of a powerful idea”—Darwinism—and
they created “a social myth” that Hunter did much to spread throughout the Western
world (Smith 1985, p. 193). The Kallikak family study was even translated into
German in 1914, and the full text appeared in the German academic journal Friedrich
Mann’s Pedagogishes Magazin. As a result, the Kallikak study also had a significant
impact on Nazi Germany’s racist policies that ended in the Holocaust.

One example was the infamous July 14 1933, sterilization law that began the
murder of millions of “inferior” persons (Smith 1985, pp. 161–162). Hitler
used the same reasoning that Hunter used to justify his eugenic programs. For
example, under the subheading “Parasitism and its Cost to Society” Hunter wrote
that hundreds of families, such as the Kallikak family,

exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this
country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain
animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families
have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting,
stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for
by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum
exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true
parasites (1914, p. 263).

Hunter then quotes the now-notorious American eugenicist Charles Davenport
(using the expression that Hitler later made famous: “blood tells”), writing
eugenics has documented the belief that families which produce brilliant men
and women did so because they received good genes from their ancestors. The
text then used an example lifted from Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
to illustrate the claim that greatness is due largely to genes (1914, p. 263).
The story is about Elizabeth Tuttle, a women “of strong will, and of extreme
intellectual vigor” who married Richard Edwards, a man of high repute and great
erudition.” This union produced Jonathan Edwards

a noted divine, and president of Princeton College. Of the descendants of Jonathan
Edwards . . . a brief catalogue must suffice: Jonathan Edwards, Jr., president of
Union College; Timothy Dwight, president of Yale; Sereno Edwards Dwight, president
of Hamilton College; Theodore Dwight Woolsey . . . president of Yale College; Sarah,
wife of Tapping Reeve founder of Litchfield Law School, herself no mean lawyer;
. . . Timothy Dwight, second, president of Yale University . . . Theodore William
Dwight, founder and for thirty-three years warden of Columbia Law School . . .
Merrill Edwards Gates, president of Amherst College. . . . Of the daughters of
Elizabeth Tuttle distinguished descendants also came. Robert Treat Paine, signer
of the Declaration of Independence; Chief Justice of the United States Morrison
R. Waite; Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland, presidents of the United States.
These and many other prominent men and women can trace the characters which
enabled them to occupy the positions of culture and learning they held back
to Elizabeth Tuttle (Hunter 1914, pp. 263–264).

No mention was made of the critical factor that social influence and privilege
had in the success of this family. Genetics was the only factor given (Smith
1985). Olasky and Perry wrote that “Hunter’s view of eugenics, widely accepted
early in the twentieth century, was a common deduction drawn from and associated
with Darwinian theory” (2005, p. 70). They added that Hunter explained Darwinian
evolution in only five pages, then moved on to the meat of the book, namely
the section on

“heredity and variation” that included eugenics. This popular connection between
natural selection and social engineering would soon fan the flames of opposition
to teaching Darwinism, particularly in light of the “remedies” that had “been
tried successfully in Europe” on the eve of World War I, including sterilizing
mental patients, criminals, and other genetic “contaminants” (Olasky and Perry
2005, p. 70).

Hunter openly advocated the infamous solution, negative genetics, to what he
saw as the mental illness and crime problem, genetically inferior persons. The
reasoning was if these

people were lower animals; we would probably kill them off to prevent them
from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating
the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage
and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race (Hunter
1914, pp. 261–263).

Many Tennessee taxpayers, especially those of African American background,
objected to the implications of the whole evolution doctrine that were made
explicit in the very science text required by their state. Even prior to the
1925 Tennessee law, so great was the outcry against these passages in many other
states that the publisher, American Book Company, had them rewritten (Tennessee
used the original 1914 edition until 1926). Even the title of the book, Civic
Biology, implied eugenics because the text taught that it is our civic duty
to apply eugenics to achieve racial improvement.

The ACLU Becomes Involved

Soon after the Tennessee “anti-evolution law” was passed, the American Civil
Liberties Union began advertising for volunteers to challenge the law in court.
The city of Dayton saw this as an opportunity to attract both attention and
tourism. The local politicians then urged a new young football coach and math
teacher, John Scopes, who once substituted for a biology teacher for a few days,
to claim that he had violated the law during his short substitute teaching stint.

Prominent scientists from major universities soon flocked to Dayton to challenge
the right of the state to regulate the teaching of human evolution and eugenics
in public schools. A critical point is that these expert witnesses never
once distanced themselves from the many inflammatory racist passages in
A Civic Biology. Some of them were active supporters of the eugenics
movement, as was Hunter’s text. Even after the abuses of Darwinian eugenics
by the Nazis in the 1930s became common knowledge, some academics still approved
the eugenic passages in this once-required public high school biology textbook.

Among the first persons to awaken to the racism lurking quite undisguised in
these passages had been the left-leaning Democratic presidential candidate,
William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Bryan “stood at the forefront of the most progressive
victories in his time: Women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, the
graduated income tax,” among others (Gould 1991, p. 417). His nickname since
his first presidential candidacy (1896) was “The Great Commoner,” and Bryan
believed his battle against evolution was an extension of both his populist
support and his life work (Gould 1991, p. 419).

Historian Michael Kazin expatiates on Bryan’s attachments both to Thomas Jefferson
and to the type of rural yeomen on whom Jefferson had pinned his moral hopes
for the American Republic (2006). Although Bryan harbored “doubts on the subject
of evolution,” his objections to teaching human evolution went far beyond his
concerns about a scientific theory (Gilbert 1997 p. 25). A major concern of
Bryan was that Darwinism had been used to justify the German war machine and
that the survival-of-the-fittest philosophy had been translated into the might-makes-right
ethos that had engulfed Germany and threatened to spread to other countries
(Gilbert 1997 p. 31).

Bryan, a life-long opponent of solving national problems by war, was fearful
that other nations would soon emulate Germany by using “the martial view of
Darwinism [that] had been invoked by most German intellectuals and military
leaders as a justification for war and future domination” (Gould 1991, pp.
421–422). Bryan even resigned as Secretary of State in President Wilson’s cabinet
in protest of America’s entry into World War I.

Bryan Takes on the Scopes Case

Bryan believed that the people in a democracy had the “right to determine what was taught in their schools”

Even though his health was flagging, Bryan took on the arduous Scopes case
on the basis of several issues, including his opposition to the Darwinian philosophy
of survival of the fittest, might makes right, and his support of the solid
Jeffersonian principle: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for
the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical”
(Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, 1786). In other words, Bryan
believed that the people in a democracy had the “right to determine what was
taught in their schools” (Gilbert 1997, p. 31).

Bryan pointed out several implications that many professors of his day were
drawing from Darwin’s theory, included not only eugenics, but also the nihilistic
morals of Nietzsche as elucidated in Darrow’s brief about the University of
Chicago in the Leopold-Loeb murder case, and the “moral obligation” of “superior”
races, such as the Germans in World War I, to overpower the weak races (e.g.,
the Belgians) for the advantage of the superior races future welfare. Bryan
had been awakened to this last concern by reading a book by the well-known Stanford
University biologist Vernon L. Kellogg (1917) that related his conversations
with the German General Staff in Belgium in 1914.

Opposition to Evolution by African Americans

African Americans were especially active in opposing evolution because Darwinism was a
major force that supported racism against “Negroes.” The African American responses
to Darwinism

were not merely darker reflections of the white world. On the contrary, in
an era of tremendous religious and cultural ferment within African America,
many leaders employed the controversy over evolution in ways that were strikingly
different from white approaches. In the religious world, the trial prompted
numerous black ministers to proclaim themselves fundamentalists and to declare
that the [black] race’s only hope for the future lay in a conservative, literal
interpretation of Genesis and the Bible (Moran 2012, p. 73).

Professor Moran added that African Americans living in both the Southern and
Northern states openly expressed

opposition to the theory of evolution. Ministers delivered sermons with titles
such as “Darwin’s Monkey Theory Versus God’s Man Theory” and “Bible Versus Evolution.”
The text: “Obey God.” The National Baptist Convention, with five thousand delegates
at its annual meeting in Baltimore in September 1925, passed resolutions against
both the Ku Klux Klan and evolution (Moran 2012, p. 73).

Furthermore,

[j]ust as the anti-evolution movement provoked many white Protestants to declare
publicly that they were fundamentalists, so the Scopes trial inspired many African
Americans . . .. Whether they were part of the growing diaspora of black southerners
in the North or lifetime residents of the South, a great many members of the
race in the summer of 1925 identified themselves as fundamentalists and anti-evolutionists.
While rehearsing the standard scientific and theological critiques of evolution,
however, African Americans suggested that maintaining a conservative Christian
faith was uniquely important for the advancement of the race (Moran 2012, p.
73).

He added that

many black anti-evolutionists introduced distinctive race notes into their discussions
of Darwinism. Some African American ministers found a concrete message for the
race in the anti-evolution controversy. Dr. E. W. White, pastor of Houston’s
powerful Tulane Avenue Baptist Church, preached a sermon titled “Plenty Monkey,
but More Hog in Man” to one of that church’s largest crowds ever (Moran 2012,
p. 74).

The Blunder Revealed Today

Using Darwinism to defend the coercive eugenics that was then being taught
in American schools from Hunter’s book—and promoted by academia—is now seen
as repulsive by both most scholars and most Americans. Bryan turned out to be
right on this point, while the promoters of eugenics as a corollary of human
evolution were embarrassingly wrong. Bryan was right to object to Hunter’s text
because its interpretation of science was wrong, and evolutionists were wrong
to coercively impose their Darwinian eugenics philosophy and racism on public
school students. The fact is, Bryan had identified “something deeply troubling”
in the Scopes case—and that the “fault does lie partly with scientists and their
acolytes” (Gould 1991, p. 423).

Bryan was also very concerned about the effects of Darwin’s racism teachings,
such as the following passage from The Descent of Man: “With savages,
the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated” (Darwin 1871, p. 168). Bryan
made his concerns about the dignity of humankind very clear in the presentation
that he gave to the court at the Scopes trial:

Darwin reveals the barbarous sentiment that runs through evolution and dwarfs
the moral nature of those who become obsessed with it. . . . Darwin speaks with
approval of the savage custom of eliminating the weak so that only the strong
will survive, and complains that “we civilized men do our utmost to check the
process of elimination.” How inhuman such a doctrine as this! He [Darwin] thinks
it injurious to “build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick” or
to care for the poor. Even the medical men come in for criticism because they
“exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment” (Bryan
1975, pp. 24–25).

Bryan also noted that Darwin’s hostility to the use of vaccinations existed

because it has “preserved thousands who, from a weak constitution would, but
for vaccination, have succumbed to smallpox!” All of the sympathetic activities
of civilized society are condemned because they enable “the weak members to
propagate their kind.” Then he drags mankind down to the level of the brute
and compares the freedom given to man unfavorably with the restraint that we
put on barnyard beasts. . . . Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism
as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin. Within three years a book
has appeared whose author is even more frankly brutal than Darwin. The book
. . . “The New Decalogue of Science” . . . has attracted wide attention (Bryan 1975,
pp. 24–25).

Bryan then quoted Wiggam, a best-selling author in 1925, who wrote that

Evolution is a bloody business, but civilization tries to make it a pink tea.
Barbarism is the only process by which man has ever organically progressed,
and civilization is the only process by which he has ever organically declined.
Civilization is the most dangerous enterprise upon which man ever set out. For
when you take man out of the bloody brutal but beneficent hand of natural selection
you place him at once in the soft, perfumed, daintily gloved but far more dangerous
hand of artificial selection. And unless you call science to your aid and make
this artificial selection as efficient as the rude methods of nature you bungle
the whole task (quoted in Bryan 1975, p. 25).

Darrow Supports Bryan’s Arguments

In his defense of accused murderers Loeb and Leopold, Darrow acknowledged the
influence of Darwin on his clients. In his appeal to the court, Darrow wrote
that Loeb “became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche,” a writer

who probably has made a deeper imprint on philosophy than any other
man within a hundred years, whether right or wrong. More books have been written
about him than probably all the rest of the philosophers in a hundred years.
More college professors have talked about him. In a way he has reached more
people, and still he has been a philosopher of what we might call the intellectual
cult. Nietzsche believed that [at] some time [in the future] the superman would
be born, [and] that evolution was working toward the superman (quoted
in McKernan 1924, pp. 270–271, emphasis added).

Women’s Leading the Opposition to Darwinism

In a chapter titled “Monkeys and Mothers,” Moran discusses “gender and the anti-evolution
impulse,” concluding that, during the debate over the Butler anti-evolution
act, the Tennessee State Senate Speaker

Lew D. Hill, proclaimed he had been petitioned to support the bill by “the
women of the state and the teachers association.” The bill was, he continued,
a last stand for Christianity, civilization, and motherhood. Another senator
poignantly gestured toward a mother in the gallery “whose son had been made
a confirmed infidel by having been taught evolution in a high school” (Moran
2012, p. 28).

In addition, letters to

newspapers in favor of the Butler bill were almost always sent by women, while
letters against the law tended to come from men. As Mrs. E. P. Blair of Nashville
proclaimed in a poem supporting the Butler bill, the fight against evolution
was being waged “for country, God and mother’s song” (Moran 2012, p. 28).

Moran concluded that the

This “mother’s song” was hard to ignore. In 1925 and afterward, women played
important roles in the anti-evolution controversy, both as symbols and as flesh-and-blood
activists, and they were not divided on the issue . . . one editorialist estimated
in 1925 that 70 percent of the anti-evolutionists were women. Further . . . the new
world of gender relations in the early twentieth century were surprisingly significant
forces in bringing about the Scopes trial (Moran 2012 p. 28).

One reason postulated by Moran for the opposition to Darwinism by women was because American women

have always attended church more often than men, and usually with deeper commitment.
From the creation of the Puritan colonies to the recent rise of megachurches,
women have consistently made up 60 to 70 percent of the churchgoing population
(Moran 2012, p. 32).

Another reason he gave for women’s support of anti-evolution was they were already
secure

in their church work, female activists increasingly wielded their moral authority
to carve out a larger place for themselves in politics. But they did not simply
throw themselves into the hurly-burly of masculine party politics. Rather, beyond
fighting for suffrage itself, these Victorian reformers directed their political
energy toward goals that were consistent with their traditional roles as conservators
of the home and family. The struggle against prostitution, campaigns to secure
child protection laws, and, above all, the crusade against the saloon embodied
this feminine politics of home protection (Moran 2012, p. 29).

This concern of women was also over the harm that they felt Darwinism caused
to their family.

Darrow added that one book Nietzsche wrote, titled Beyond Good and Evil,
contained a criticism of all moral codes, and actually argued that the

intelligent man is beyond good and evil; that the laws for good and the laws
for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. . . . the things that
[the convicted murderer] Nathan [Leopold] read and which no doubt influenced
him. . . . [W]hile healthy boys were playing baseball or working on the farm, or
doing odd jobs, he was reading Nietzsche, a boy who never should have seen it,
at that early age. Babe was obsessed of it, and here are some of the things
which Nietzsche taught: “Why so soft . . . For all creators are hard, and it must
seem blessedness unto you to press your hand upon millenniums . . . Become hard.
To be obsessed by moral consideration presupposes a very low grade of intellect.
We should substitute for morality the will to our own end, and consequently
to the means to accomplish that (quoted in McKernan 1924, pp. 270–271).

These were exactly Bryan’s concerns as he documented in his booklet titled
the Last Message (1975). Bryan was very concerned about the fact that
an increasing number of students were attending high school and, Bryan believed,
that “Darwinism made man too much the product of essentially a material Godless
process that invited his degradation through eugenics, too much a competitor
in a struggle for survival that justified rapacious business relations and war
between nations” (Kevles 2007, p. x).

Conclusions

Bryan’s objections to evolution were openly related to Darwin’s writings about
eugenics and its implications for human rights, human dignity, and humanity
as a whole. In short, he focused “public attention on the social implications
of Darwinism” (Larson 2003, p. 250). Bryan was especially concerned about defending
the weak against the assaults of the strong and powerful, a fact that resulted
in his being labeled “The Great Commoner.” Bryan, as a “political progressive,”
was very concerned about the

Darwinism survival-of-the-fittest thinking (known as social Darwinism when
applied to human society) [that was] behind World War 1 militarism and postwar
materialism. Of course Bryan also held religious objections to Darwinism and
he invoked [Harvard Biology Professor Louis] Agassiz’s scientific arguments
against it as well—but his fervor on this issue arose from his social concerns
(Larson 2007, p. 68).

As a result, due to “his progressive political instinct of seeking legislative
solutions to social problems, Bryan campaigned for restrictions against teaching
the Darwinian theory of human evolution in public schools” (Larson 2007, p.
68). These many well-documented facts of history are often forgotten or ignored
when Bryan’s role in the Scopes trial is reviewed (Gould 1981, p. 1987).

The most common claim is Darrow “scored a triumph for academic freedom after
John Scopes was accused of violating a Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching
of evolution” (Farrell 2011, p. 111). This background is imperative to understand
why the trial occurred and the implications of evolution both then and today.
Last, this review shows how totally erroneous the common claims are about the
Scopes Trial, such as those presented in the film Inherit the Wind.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank John UpChurch, Jody Allen, RN, Clifford Lillo, M.S., and Mary-Ann
Stewart, M.S., for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

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